Biographical Interpretation Quotes

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it's about her.

The political biographies most popular in the modern era often tell us less about their subjects than about the moment in which the books themselves are published.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

There were no clippings of Ambedkar. The only thing I had was a two-and-a-half minute film which I saw countless times. Nobody knows how he walked, how he spoke, or how he behaved. I had to conceive all those things in my mind. I had to work a lot on the make-up, too.

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

There are certain historical figures of such importance that we need to know everything about them, which is why books about Napoleon, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and the great religious founders continue to proliferate; these lives require constant reevaluation and interpretation.

To the biographer all lives bar none are dramatic constructions.

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.

I will say that adapting a character like Da Vinci really wasn't that dissimilar from doing Batman or Superman. Because all three of these guys are really iconic figures, and yes, Da Vinci was historical, but there's clearly been a lot of mythmaking about him, and a lot of things have been attributed to him that may or may not have happened.

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

It's great fun to memorize somebody's biography, and then liberally play with the real facts of their life and go a step beyond reality.